HINDU STORM: A special report.; Trust Is Torn: Police Role in Bombay Riots

Nazira Khatoon rocked slowly back and forth on a dirty mat, a bundle of quilts, a few plastic bags pulled close around her. A stream of tears glistened on her face as she recounted how a mob broke into her house in a Bombay shantytown and seized her son as the police looked on and did nothing.

"I said, 'Don't do anything to my son,' " she recalled. "He was married just two days before. The mob of 250 came. They were with swords and stones, and they pushed me into the bathroom. They took all my property and killed my son in front of me. The police just stood there watching."

Day after day after day, for nine days and nights beginning Jan. 6, mobs of Hindus rampaged through this city, killing and burning people only because they were Muslims. No Muslim was safe -- not in the slums, not in high-rise apartments, not in the city's bustling offices -- in an orgy of violence that left 600 people dead and 2,000 injured. Many Details Unreported

Now, as quiet settles in the city, the full dimensions of the violence are becoming increasingly clear, although many details -- including transcripts of police radio transmissions and other evidence showing that the police took part in the anti-Muslim violence -- have not been printed in Indian newspapers or magazines.

"It is cold-blooded," Alyque Padamsee, the chief executive of Lintas, India's largest advertising company, said of the killings. "This is a very cold-blooded pogrom. There are no concentration camps, though. They just kill people."

Interviews with victims, relief workers, politicians, civic leaders, police officers and journalists have suggested, moreover, that the killing, arson and looting were far from random.

In fact, they were organized by Hindu gangs, abetted by the Bombay police and directed at Muslim families and businesses. The extent of police cooperation with the Hindu mobs appears to have spread through the entire police force, excluding only the most senior officers.

Transcripts of conversations between the police control room and officers on the streets, taken from the regular police radio band and made available to The New York Times by an Indian reporter, show that the officers at police headquarters repeatedly told constables in the field to allow Muslim homes to burn and to prevent aid from reaching victims.

According to one transcript, for instance, the control room referred to the site of a fire by saying it must be a garage owned by a Muslim man, with the speaker using a vulgar term for a circumcised man in the language of Maharashtra state.

"Let it burn," he added, according to the transcript. "If it belongs to a Maharashtrian, don't burn anything that belongs to a Maharashtrian." The voice added that the police should "burn everything" belonging to a Muslim, this time using another obscene reference to Muslims.

Throughout the nine days of rioting, witnesses said that neither the Maharashtra authorities nor the central Government in New Delhi made any effort to stanch the flow of blood.

According to witnesses, Muslim mothers watched as their sons were pulled from their homes, slain or burned alive while mobs of chanting, cheering Hindus danced around the blazing bodies. Mosques and Muslim stores were firebombed. Men on the street were made to drop their trousers so Hindu mobs could see if they were circumcised, as all Muslim men are.

In the aftermath of the violence, hundreds of thousands of Muslims have fled the city, many of them unlikely ever to return. The Background Violence Becomes More Systematic

Since its independence from Britain and partition with the Muslim nation of Pakistan in 1947, India has been regularly torn by sectarian violence and bloodshed, especially between Hindus and Muslims.

There have also been cases when the violence seemed organized. In 1984, after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards, a campaign of murderous retribution that many charged was abetted or instigated by governing Congress Party politicians left thousands of Sikhs dead in New Delhi.

But after the riots in Bombay, India's mightiest economic center, many people say the violence has never before been so systematic, concentrated and foreboding.

The bloodshed has stunned Bombay and raised doubts about whether the city will ever recover. Before the riots, many Bombayites had let themselves think that their city had triumphed over caste and religious conflicts and that nothing like this could happen here.

"Some of the happenings in Bombay do bear a resemblance to Germany in the 1930's," said Nani Palkhivala, a constitutional lawyer and former Indian Ambassador to the United States. "These are things we have never seen in 300 years of Bombay. People were literally burnt alive. Is this civilization? Is this humanity?"

Much of Bombay's gloom comes from the inaction of the government. Neither the Chief Minister of Maharashtra state, Sudhakarrao Naik, nor the Indian Prime Minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, reacted to the violence as it consumed the city.

In the eyes of many people in Bombay, Mr. Rao has been indifferent to the problem. Delegations of this city's leading citizens, its business leaders, movie stars and even the Roman Catholic cardinal met with him in New Delhi to urge some action.

"He just sat there," a participant said. "He just said, 'Yes, yes,' and then we were led out."

The physical scars of the violence can be seen everywhere. Bombay is a megalopolis of 12.5 million people with luxury high-rise buildings, great swathes of shantytowns, avenues of glittering jewelry and fashion shops and pavements carpeted by street dwellers.

But now the hulks of charred cars, trucks and buses, like the carapaces of desiccated beetles, litter the gutters. Rows of storefronts are interspersed by the firebombed shells of Muslim-owned shops, like missing teeth. Bombay's bread shops, almost exclusively owned by Muslims, have been gutted. Lumber yards were torched, as were much of the city's leather workshops, all Muslim-owned.

For much of the last six months, India has been wrapped in a tightening web of tension as Hindu religious and political organizations have called for tougher treatment of India's 110 million Muslims.

The first overt violence supported by this broad coalition was the demolition of a 16th-century mosque in December in the northern religious town of Ayodhya that Hindus said had been constructed on the site that they revere as the birthplace of the god Ram.

The destruction of the mosque led to widespread Muslim protests and clashes with the police and security forces in which more than 2,000 people were officially reported to have died all across India, including 200 in Bombay.

After the destruction of the mosque, the Rao Government did order a ban on some militant Hindu and Muslim organizations and arrested several leaders. But here in Bombay, the authorities did not ban a virulently anti-Muslim organization called Shiv Sena or arrest any of its members. The Beginning Two Sparks Ignite Waves of Rioting

As the first wave of violence over the mosque subsided, Shiv Sena was apparently preparing a systematic campaign against the city's one million Muslims. What it needed was an incident, real or fabricated, that might call forth mobs of Hindu street thugs to carry out the attacks.

The moment came Jan. 6, with the stabbing of two Hindu dock workers, and on Jan. 7, when a Hindu family of four was burned to death in its hut in the slums of Jogeshwari in north Bombay.

The violence was recounted by Shamim Mohammed Khan as she stood in a silent line of other women waiting for relief workers to distribute grain from a small sack. Although 19, she looked older, having lost her home and her belongings in the attacks. The violence, she said, did not seem spontaneous.

"After the first wave of riots in December, some people came and asked what I had in my house," she said. "They were very friendly in manner. When the second wave came, they came and killed my husband. The Shiv Sena, they came. Fifty people came, armed with sticks, chains, pipes, axes."

"I think my neighbors came only because they were forced," she said. "They were told, 'If you don't help, we will get you.' So my neighbors took my utensils, my pots and dishes, and sold them."

She added that afterward they burned down the entire slum area, leaving 500 people homeless.

As the violence and the death toll climbed, Saamna, the daily newspaper published by Shiv Sena, urged its followers on. The paper is read by hundreds of thousands of lower-middle-class and lower-class people of Maharashtra, whose capital is Bombay.

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"They have taken advantage of our helplessness and timidity," the paper wrote on Jan. 9, referring to the city's Muslims. Charging that Hindus had been "massacred" in the two incidents in Bombay, it said, "If the law cannot protect us, then the hell with the law." The Authorities Police Complicity Is Documented

Along the corridors of retail commerce in Bombay, the once seamless face of shop fronts is punctuated by the blackened cavities of Muslim businesses -- a cloth store, a baker, a hardware shop. Along the same street, Hindu shops were left undamaged.

"They had the business license registers from the city," a reporter here said of the rioters, asking that his name not be used. "With the registers, they could find the Muslims, even those which were owned by Hindus but rented to Muslim businesses."

And nowhere during the attacks on Muslim shops did Bombay's police impede the attacks. Indeed, there is widespread evidence that they ignored the looting and firebombing and even encouraged it or took part.

A Hindu merchant shopkeeper, speaking on the condition that his name not be used, described how a police truck pulled up in front of a neighboring shop. "A police inspector, I saw his rank on his uniform, came out with some constables," he said. "They broke the lock on the shop and went inside. They came out with all the shoes and put them in the truck. Then they burned the shop."

"I know many of these Shiv Sena boys," he said. "I grew up with them. And I'm scared."

Even in Bombay's wealthiest residential areas, neighborhoods filled with the corporate barons of India, the violence penetrated. Shoba De, the author of several popular novels and the wife of a leading businessman, said Shiv Sena mobs had searched apartment buildings for Muslims.

"They went door to door asking who is Muslim," she said. "They would look on the name boards in the lobby and then go upstairs and throw the Muslim families out of their apartments and put padlocks on them."

The most startling evidence of police complicity has been in the transcripts of conversations picked up off the police radio band. These have been obtained by some reporters in India and translated into English, although they have not been printed in Indian newspapers or magazines, apparently because they are too inflammatory.

In one conversation, for instance, the police in a district called Dongri asked the control room what to do about two army trucks filled with milk sent as relief to a slum area where Muslims had been burned out of their huts.

"Why are you distributing milk to them?" the control room asked. "Do not distribute milk to the laandyas. Have you understood?" Then the control room ordered, "Seize that vehicle."

"The police have been playing a very negative role," said Farida Lambay, a social worker who was trying to resettle Muslim families who had been burned out of their homes. She said the police had become "very, very communalized," a term referring to virulent sectarian prejudice, and added: "People have lost faith in the police."

Confronted with reports of police complicity, Babanrao Pachpute, the Maharashtra Home Minister, at first denied that the police had been involved in attacks on Muslims. But when it was pointed out that there were tapes of police radio conversations and accounts by witnesses, he said: "It was so difficult for the police. There were so many people in the mobs, it was difficult for them."

Pressed further, the minister said: "All these things will be revealed in the judicial inquiry. We are taking actions and putting people behind bars."

The state government has appointed a Bombay high court judge to investigate the riots, although many doubt that it will lead to any firm conclusions or to prosecution of individuals.

The inquiry was established after at least three private groups in Bombay called for an investigation. The groups are the Committee to Protect Human Rights, a small group; the Bombay Chapter of the People's Union of Civil Liberties, a legal rights agency, and an ad hoc group of senior industrialists led by J. R. D. Tata, who heads India's largest industrial house. The Militants Group's Leader Defends Attacks

The man driving the Shiv Sena forward, and the voice behind its newspaper Saamna, is Bal Thackery, who rose to visibility a decade ago by leading a violent campaign against southern Indians who had settled in Bombay.

In an interview at his home, Mr. Thackery refused repeatedly to respond to charges that his followers had engaged in killing and destruction throughout the city.

"Those who started the riots," he said, referring to Muslims, "have learned their lessons well."

In an interview with The Economic Times, a leading financial journal, he said his followers were only responding to violence committed against them. "They participated only to the extent of retaliating to the attacks," he said.

Mr. Thackery's political activities started in the 1980's, when he demanded that Bombay be kept for the citizens of Maharashtra state, who speak a language and have an ethnic identity distinct from those of neighboring states. Immigration from other parts of India has continued unabated, and now Mr. Thackeray has turned to his anti-Muslim credo.

During the interview, Mr. Thackery allowed only a few notes to be taken, and he was guarded by Bombay policemen with submachine guns. He insisted that he wanted only to evict Muslims who were from Pakistan or Bangladesh, not all Muslims.

"All Muslims from Bangladesh and from Pakistan, those elements come to my country to create trouble to see we would never live in peace," he said. "Those Muslims who might have given them shelter must be kicked out."

When it was suggested that many Bombay residents were comparing his group's actions to the Nazi attacks on Jews, he reacted angrily. "I have no respect for intellectuals," he said. "They create problems by giving dirty opinions. I am a man of the masses." The Reaction Bombay Ponders Legacy of Hatred

Like much of India, Bombay has a prosperous intelligentsia proud of its commitment to the principles of secularism and sectarian harmony enshrined in India's constitution, but often ignored in the nation's impoverished slums and villages. The Bombay events have left this elite group shaken.

"This will change the face of Bombay forever," said Shabana Azmi, a leading movie actress in this film capital of India. "In January, what happened is that the elite and the middle class were exposed for the first time to the kind of violence the poor are exposed to."

Others say that the riots exposed how the elite has been complacent and distant from India's real problems.

"I think we are guilty of being out of touch," said Tariq Ansari, the managing director of Midday Publications. "The Shiv Sena evolved from a very violent genesis to become part of us. We would do business with them. We've told ourselves, 'They don't do anything major; they do their little violence.' "

"It was interesting that the mobs came out of the slums," Mr. Ansari added. "This was really an upper-class nightmare, the monster coming out of the slums. And I'm convinced it's not over."

Now, although the worst of the violence has passed, at least for the moment, the signs of hatred continue. Labor unions run by Shiv Sena are intimidating Muslim workers, preventing them from returning to their jobs in some of the city's largest industries, including Otis Elevator, the Mahindra jeep and tractor plants and companies on the docks.

Meanwhile, the "ethnic cleansing" of the city's Muslim population proceeds, perhaps not so violently, but still methodically. Railway officials report that 215,000 people, virtually all Muslims, fled the city on special trains. A Hindu Brahmin business woman who employed 15 Bengali Muslims in a fabric business reported that her workers had returned to Calcutta and had said they would never come back to Bombay. "They said if I moved my workshops out of the city, they might come back," she said.

Every night, rumors swirl through the shantytowns, bringing fear and desperation. And every night as well, one or two people die in flare-ups of violence, even though the city government insists that Bombay is recovering.

"At the end of the tunnel we are in, there is no light," the editor of The Illustrated Weekly wrote in a recent edition. "There are only the gas chambers. We have to decide whether we want to do something about it, or head straight into the blinding darkness."

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an article yesterday about the Bombay riots referred incorrectly in some copies to the targets of the violence. As the rest of the article noted, they were mostly Muslims, not Hindus.

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A version of this special report appears in print on February 4, 1993, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: HINDU STORM: A special report.; Trust Is Torn: Police Role in Bombay Riots. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe